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She keeps setting a fourth plate at the table. No one comments anymore. Her mother clears it like clockwork. Her father eats in silence. Her sister rolls her eyes but never removes it. Even the dog sits by that chair, tail still. It started a year ago. After the accident. After the quiet ambulance. After the unlit candle at the funeral. She set the plate the next morning, and the chair exhaled, not a creak, but something deeper. Like memory stretching. At  first, she tried to explain. “It just feels wrong,” she said. “Like someone might still come home.” Eventually, she stopped speaking. She only placed the plate, warmed it with breath, and set a fork to the right. Sometimes, she wonders if the plate is less for him and more for herself. That the ritual is not a memory, but a tether. Something that reminds her she hasn’t drifted too far from who she was before the silence arrived. Sometimes, a curl of steam escapes. Not from food, just breath, like winter mornings when the air admits something sacred. Once, she caught her father staring at the plate. His eyes weren’t sad. Just curious. As if trying to remember a face he never wanted to forget. There are days she swears she hears breathing at that seat. A quiet inhale, measured and steady, timed with her own. Once, she reached out. Her hand passed through nothing but came back warm. Each night, she washes the plate, dries it with the same towel, and places it in the same cupboard. Each morning, she takes it out again. One morning, the chair had shifted ever so slightly. Not pulled out, not moved with intent, just... different. As if someone had tried to sit and changed their mind. She didn’t mention it, but that day, her hands trembled while pouring the tea. The world moves on like a polite machine. Teachers talk about deadlines. Strangers hold open doors. Sunlight bends differently in winter, but the chair waits. She doesn't believe in ghosts. Only habits. Only warmth that lingers too long. Only the way grief builds a home in your bones and calls it memory. When the light touches the fourth plate just right, she smiles. As if someone’s laughing with her. As if the world never ended at all. Nehal Sharma is a Jaipur-based writer. Writing is how she lives inside her own curiosity, turning observation into reflection and reflection into story. She runs the blog “Mythology Meets Reality,” where she tries to make sense of it all without pretending it makes sense.

Set me down inside a diner scene—in a film, a novel, on TV—and I’m bound to settle into whatever story you’re telling.  My back intuits the vinyl of the booth; my small breath quickens to mingle with the sighs aspiring from warmed coffee; surrounding chatter about new storefront churches, high-school basketball and the weather becomes the weather I know.  David Lynch, that great, mad American filmmaker, touched the truth when he said, “There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milkshake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.”  Lynch always meant what he said.  From a wide canon of curious moments, the sun-stabbed diner scene in his noir Mulholland Drive —and its strange afterword—still passes viewers’ lips 25 years later. Cherished moments from his TV masterpiece Twin Peaks  nestle into the warm, wood-paneled world of the Double R Diner.  (I’d die to visit the real thing, still a working cafe in North Bend, Washington; though rumors say the pie is itself a tourist trap, nowhere near as good as Dale Cooper and the Bookhouse Boys claimed.)  Plenty of my favorite artists understand this safety Lynch identifies, this sacredness. In his Coffee and Cigarettes, filmmaker   Jim Jarmusch pillowed diners with reverent black-and-white, escorted us to table with the likes of Iggy Pop and Tom Waits, translated the dialogue of weary, knowing nods.   And while After Dark is considered a “lesser” work, legendary Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami made me a disciple for life by visiting a Tokyo Denny’s on its early pages. First leading us there at 11:56 p.m., Murakami reveals the personality of the place by night; “everything about the restaurant is anonymous and interchangeable.”  Yet roles are performed and routines observed in diners like Murakami’s; touch is transferred, from fingertips to ceramic coffee mugs, then to forehead temples. This nearly blank and transposable slate, these modest gestures, bend toward twinned meaning. There’s the inherent meaning of being anywhere at all and the meaning to come if and when another person joins us in our rituals.  In the diner, where we comb a menu of choices yet so often stick to the usual , this want for meaning becomes softer yet more sure. This is why patrons make sad eyes at waitresses here and would-be philosophers lean back to unburden themselves of deep-down wisdom before loosing a low whistle and waving a hand as if to say It all matters. Or maybe it doesn’t.  Here we enjoy our meandering conversations, punctuated with silence and shrugs and non-sequiturs, conversations which call up details no one needs to remember even as they breach the questions everyone is asking.  Insecure party hosts and seasoned silence-fillers love to pose some variation of a worn-out quiz: Tell me the people, living or dead, you would invite to a dinner like this one.  To me, the supremely more interesting question is who would you take with you into the diner?  Two fellows come to mind. I reach backward more than 50 years, then nearly 500 for very different men who almost share a name. Into the East Coast and the middle of the 20th century, I call up the Beat prince, Jack Kerouac. Facing the heart of 16th-century Spain, I ask one more favor from St. John of the Cross.  For all the strangeness of these invitations, we three intersect—minds and souls, now embodied—at the night.  Kerouac wrote so many different nights: nights on the road and tucked into your hometown; nights of much wine and much song; nights of consolation and without conclusion; nights when you touch something or someone miraculous without caring whether they will fade to stardust in your palm.  Mattering most, the ways Kerouac treated night as a three-dimensional possibility. In the company of childhood friends or would-be lovers, whether moving your body through the tangles of New York City or to the edge of a shy New England creek, Kerouac’s belief came through. We might be different people inside the night and on the night’s other side. This faith keeps him like a patron saint on my shoulder.  I picked up St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul at a time I would read any night-bearing word. His lyrical writ, enduring some 450 years, tests the night as metaphor for the Godward life, a place and a condition of co-equal darkness and light. In his night, we know the blessing of emptiness. Strange comfort permeates the souls which feel themselves turning over, being restored to a more austere happiness in God. Here, even desperation and doubt count as blessings, drawing us up into inevitable holy love. We endure the night for the sake of eternity growing within us.  John’s commitment to the image impresses me. While he still treats night as something to be overcome, his surprising tenderness with these dark hours keeps me coming back. The more evident saint, he is no lesser mystery. I reach for them to indulge the questions I keep asking. Must night be a metaphor for where we meet God or may we actually meet God there? Is night a good unto itself? Am I right to tour these late hours, naming lights whose brightness passes all understanding? Or am I deceived, too faithless to wait for the sunrise? In his story collection The Coast of Chicago, Stuart Dybek writes of “an all-night diner to which, sooner or later, insomniacs find their way.” “In winter, when snow drifts over curbs, they cross the trampled intersections until they come upon footprints that perfectly fit their shoes and lead them there. On nights like this in summer, the diner’s lighted corner draws them to its otherwise dark neighborhood like moths.” This is where I propose we meet.  One man at a time eases into a back booth, and even in the easing, our dissimilarities grow obvious. From his wise-cornered eyes, John looks around perplexed, perhaps even offended, at shifting stacks of hot cakes. Jack sinks into the place like a man who knows the contemplative appeal of a steak-and-eggs platter.    Seated and thus smaller, John carries the charisma of a sage still, as if the very particles around him are charged with the electricity of God. Jack lights a cigarette, huffs and puffs and coughs a blue joke, speaks of a couple saxophonists nobody but him knows.  Before the coffee delivered and plates of biscuits, John performs the sign of the cross as if to consecrate the body and blood of Christ. Waiting for his new friend’s hands to fall into rest, Jack offers some weak but not unkind wordplay about this true man of the cross. I am not embarrassed by him. For each way Jack mildly irritates me, he enunciates a dozen things I forget to thank God for; Jack teaches me to number the trees, notice the hearts burning within strangers, to slacken my grip and extend my hands in front of me as if I might perforate the night, become one with its glories. I want Jack’s voice in my ear, at the table.  My whole life, I have played the translator. Growing up, I served groups of misunderstanding friends and still go between adults whose values live closer than they might appear. So I don’t mind translating now; the labor causes me to listen ever closer to these saints and their words.  Already, I hear the consonance as coffee comes. Coffee keeps us common. The diner does its magic. In this place, time both stills and, as Murakami wrote, reflects “deeper stage(s) of night,” darkness softening and sharpening just outside our window. Eventually we speak the same language.  Realizing this without needing to comment, we breathe lighter, talk louder. Sometimes we even roar. Rare moments resemble a better, truer rendering of 2 a.m. dorm-room conversations where you talk about everything and nothing at once.  Jack tells stories, and inside them, hums themes neither John or I know as if to ring our bells. John’s eyes twinkle as he uncovers a punchline that cuts the centuries.  And I keep the center, sliding questions back across the table. Somewhere in a second or third hour of conversation, we turn the night inside-out. Jack and I occasionally stick out our chests, flip John’s words around like a prod:  You really  think a soul can come to see “penances are its pleasures; fasts its joys; and its consolations are to make use of the sacraments and to occupy itself in Divine things?” We lace the question mark with exclamation points. John really does. His conviction begets intimacy. He talks, and Jack and I listen with intention, murmur what sounds like “amens.” Once, I swear to God, Jack mutters “when you put it like that ...” under his breath.  My friends never quite achieve a shared understanding of the word “sensual.” I lose count of how many times John speaks of purgation, and how many times Jack swallows the term like his coffee’s ground-speckled dregs.  Jack tips ash in the tray and John subdivides sentences, pausing sometimes to gaze at the ceiling as if waiting for divine permission to keep speaking.  Our words finger sides of the same coin, even if we stop short of spending the silver. Night is for traveling through, John asserts. Jack agrees, though for him the motion is its own prize. We all believe God, or some God-force, bids us come, whistling our way through and waiting for us at the sidewalk’s end.  We all want the same things from the night: to meet our created selves and transcend them somehow; to stumble into proof of love; to know light enough to keep us walking toward that great and indissoluble force. Reaching the longer lulls, my friends—to their credit—seem willing to live within them. In this quiet accord, this acceptance, I know why we gather.  Sitting with Jack to my right and John across the table, hands drawing remnant warmth from mugs our waitress long abandoned, I am free to reject false choices, to broker two visions of the night and however many more the night may abide. The night is big enough to harmonize.  For a kid who grew up with the metaphor alone, freedom attends the notion of living with the metaphor and in the physical night without fear. Contra John, I believe my desires will deepen rather than flatline there. Only night will tell.  I pick up the check as Jack offers genuine thanks and John’s downcast gaze speaks a humble word. Stepping into the night, really early morning—into the myth of it, its dimensions both known and beyond speech—I am already losing my friends’ words. They leave me their texts to retrace, but there is something truer at work.  In diners, the impression of the conversation, that which we carry away, means as much as the conversation itself. This is the usual, and it is not.  I carry away gratitude for a person’s own saints, for their momentary guidance and unintended consequences of their unintended prayers.  Of course, I carry gratitude for the night itself, more sacred than I believed before we sat for coffee and communion. Blessed is the night, and blessed are those who will be found therein.  Aarik Danielsen is a writer, journalist and librarian living in Missouri. His work is forthcoming or appears in Pleiades, Image Journal, Split Lip, Rain Taxi, Tinderbox Poetry Journal  and more. He sometimes teaches at his alma mater, the Missouri School of Journalism. More often, he travels I-29 to and from Nebraska, where his partner resides.

The government is replacing people with Replicants. They got to Carter a couple nights ago—when I woke up, I knew it wasn’t my fiancé lying beside me, even though it looked just like him. I wondered whether they’d programmed the thing to think it was really him before I slid my gun out from under the pillow and blew half its head off. That’s how I discovered that Replicants are organic. Fake Carter looked human, right down to the blood and brain.  I didn’t cry because I knew in my heart that he was still alive and probably giving his captors hell. I decided to try to find him, but I knew I couldn’t do it alone—and thanks to my rescue pup, I won’t have to.   Taffy is part Bloodhound, so I’ve been teaching her to growl whenever she catches a whiff of Replicant. She’s a fast learner, and fake Carter’s body has been the perfect training tool.  Last night, my good girl hit 100% accuracy, so now I’ll know who I can trust to join me in the fight. If our numbers are strong enough, we just might have a chance of freeing everyone who’s been taken. Maybe we can even bring down the whole damn regime.  I wake at dawn and shuffle downstairs to make coffee and work on my plan. As usual, Taffy bounds into the kitchen to greet me—but she stops short. And then she growls.  Maria Carvalho’s multi-genre work has appeared in a variety of literary magazines, including Roi Fainéant Press, MetaStellar, Free Flash Fiction, Twin Pies Literary, 101 Words, Literary Revelations,  and All Your Stories . Her short stories have been published in many anthologies, including several titles in the Owl Hollow Press Anthology Series, and her poetry appears in several best-selling books from Literary Revelations. Her popular children's book Hamster in Space!  was praised by Kirkus Indie Reviews for its "sharp understanding of kids' wacky sense of humor." Find her on Bluesky and Twitter: @immcarvalho

The first thing I notice the ammo room smells peppermint; normally a soothing scent but now I find it offensive.  “Who’s the asshole?” I murmur. “What are you jabberin’ over there?” a cracked hoarse voice barks from the dark. It’s the old sergeant, Half-Brain Marc, he’s probably taking his usual afternoon snooze in this godforsaken place. I sniffthe air again. “Some clown must’ve sprayed peppermint here. Who’s got the twisted mind to do something like this?” “Peppermint!” Marc exclaims. “It’s jus’ musty, rusty, gunpowdery stench, nothin’ else.” “Could be my fault. After ‘shrooming in the latrine since lunch and popping double ketamine, all odors are pretty offensive to me right now.” “Mushrooms? C’mon, Frank, you’re a holy roller, never do drugs. I can’t recall seein’ you with anythin’ stronger than green tea. No buzz, no hall’cinogenic for you.” The geezer is right. I’ve been imagining myself snorting cocaine, cursing at a colonel or higher rank in front of others, cutting off my right index finger to become a tuco — anything that would throw me in the stockade for a couple years. By then this hurly-burly should be over. I’ll emerge as a phoenix from fire, a peace warrior, write a best seller, go on talk shows, maybe run for office. Back to reality, I hate being the regiment’s sniper. Especially now that my spotter is out of commission on account of the neck wound he received last Friday. And of course I can’t trust any of these yahoos to take his place. Definitely not Marc who, I suspect, fills his canteen bottle with cheap bourbon, instead of the mandatory alertness potion that keeps you awake for fifteen hours, guaranteed. The old son-of-a-bitch also reeks of peppermint. J. S. O’Keefe is a scientist, trilingual translator and writer. His short stories and poems have been published in Everyday Fiction, Roi Faineant, 101 Words, Spillwords, ScribesMICRO, 50WS, AntipodeanSF, Friday Flash Fiction, Spirit Fire Review, Medium, Paragraph Planet, WENSUM, 50 Give or Take, 6S, Satire, MMM, etc.

I’m waiting in line at the corner store when I see my ghost four people ahead of me, trying to buy a pack of cigarettes. But he only has ghost money, so the clerk won’t let him buy anything. “Why don’t you try the boarded-up gas station across the street?” the clerk asks. “I hear it’s haunted. I’m sure they have all sorts of ghost cigarettes you can buy over there.” “They don’t have Camels,” my ghost says. “They only carry brands that no longer exist.” My ghost tries to get what he wants, that pack of Camels, the brand that smells like chocolate and/or your parents. Because chocolate smells like life. But in this world, if you don’t have real money at least, you’re going to need help to get the things you want. You’re going to have to ask for it. Ghosts are always asking for things, which is number four on the list of reasons why people don’t like them. After looking at me balefully for dragging my ghost in here somehow, the clerk just ignores the spectre, and just like that the other customers do too.  “Any of you could have a near-death experience,” my ghost grimly whispers. “Or a séance gone wrong, or bad credit even. The end of the world is nigh, all it takes is one little curse, and you’ll only wish you had been kinder to those of us from the other side.” The people in the store just shuffle through him, buying booze and cigarettes and other assorted crap that’ll kill them more or less slowly. “You don’t have to be assholes,” my ghost mumbles forlornly, not even bothering to try scaring anybody anymore. When it’s my turn, my ghost looks at me with the most reproachful expression, like if you won’t even buy cigarettes for your own ghost, then what sort of person are you? Someone who probably kicks his ghost when he thinks nobody is looking, that’s who. “Fine,” I sigh. “One pack of Camel Lights.” “Camel Unfiltereds,” my ghost interrupts. “Unfiltereds,” I proclaim. “And this here extra-large bag of Sun Chips is for me. It’s on sale, right? Oh, and give me some matches, too.” Grudgingly, the clerk rings me up, making me pay extra for the bag. Everyone knows ghosts are bad for business, at least the kind of business you want to have. But I choose to be aggressively cheerful in the situation, because I am NOT the sort of person who kicks his ghost, and I want my ghost to know it. How did I get to meet my own ghost, me who is definitely among the living? Let’s just say when you get the phone call for the pre-planned cemetery plot package next to your parents, and the salesperson goes on and on about how much you’ll save by purchasing NOW when you are in the pre-need stage of your life, and how, for just a little tiny bit more, you can get the full ghost experience to guide you in this life and help you commune with your lost loved ones: you really should say no thank you  to that last part. Outside the store, I hand the cigarettes over. My ghost opens the pack, tapping it first repeatedly against the wall of the store, cursing the clerk and all the clerk’s relatives and pets in terrible detail with each tap. “Do you want one?” he finally says. “No thanks,” I say reflexively. “Smoking’s bad for you.” “Not if you’re already dead,” my ghost says. “We get to smoke all we want. Light me?” I light the cigarette in my ghost’s mouth. I can see my face, my ghost face, and yes, it’s weird and that’s reason number three people don’t like ghosts, especially their own. We cross the street, walking past the abandoned gas station, up to the gates of the cemetery. It’s the Day of the Dead, as my ghost has been reminding me off and on all week, between haunting me and going wherever the hell ghosts go, and even though I’m not Catholic, I’d be a bad son if I didn’t at least make an attempt  to say hello to my parents. The security guard sees my ghost and waves us through. “You don’t like me,” my ghost says, not for the first time. “You think I’m a shitty ghost, but it’s really because you don’t like yourself.” “I don’t think you’re shitty,” I say, also not for the first time, opening up my bag of chips in front of a ghost who thinks he knows all the answers. “But I have no idea how you turned out to be who you are, because I am nothing like you.” “That’s what you’d like to think,” my ghost says. The smugness of the dead: that’s reason number two. We’ve arrived at my parents’ grave, right next to my own with the unfilled date on the stone. “You want some?” “Empty carbs? Fill me up!” He opens his mouth obscenely wide. I can’t do it: put chips in his face, getting filthy septic ghost juices on my hands. I hand him the bag, but it slowly drifts through his fingers and a bunch clatter on my grave. “Don’t be a chickenshit,” my ghost says. “They’re still sorta healthy, so I can’t hold onto them. You’re going to have to feed me. Or maybe I should tell you when you are going to die or whether there is in fact, a God who is judging everything you do and think right now.” One by one, I feed chips to my ghost, and it’s all kinds of gross to see how much he enjoys them. After a while, he says, “Your parents are here, do you have anything you want to say?” I’ve been nervously waiting for this moment. The salesperson was quite eloquent about this part: get the ghost, and you’ve got a direct line to the land of the dead, at least once a year, depending on your faith and the sincerity of your beliefs: you are sincere in your beliefs, right? I look around, observing more than a few other families having quiet conversations, and try to feel brave. “Well?” my ghost asks. “Hi Mom, Hi Dad,” I say to my ghost. “How are things in Heaven?” “They say they can’t go into the specifics but that they’re fine, and what the hell are you doing with a giant bag of Sunchips at your age?” “They were on sale, Mom,” I say, just assuming it would be my mom who would still be critiquing my eating habits. “Was the diabetes on sale too? We see the whole delta of your life and the consequences of your decisions, the ones you make and the ones you don’t, and trust me, you do not want to go there.” My ghost gives me a gleeful I’m not the only one who thinks you’re a fuckup look as he digs out another cigarette. Somehow, he’s figured out how to make the matches work all on his own. “Okay, Dad,” I say, because that was definitely a Dad thing to listen to. They’re right of course, I mean, who am I kidding buying the economy size? It’s kind of stupid to do self-destructive shit when you can see your own ghost sticking his tongue out at you. So I get up off the grass covering our graves, grabbing the bag of Sunchips. I reach in for a handful, which I start placing at the various graves around me, the ones where it looks like nobody’s going to visit. I hope that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re visiting the cemetery on the Day of the Dead. It’s not like I could just interrupt some grieving family at their own plot and ask whether it would be morally ok or culturally appropriative if I left a bunch of junk food on top of their dead relatives. I wander around in the crisp fall weather, stopping by the children’s section and then the Civil War veterans’ memorial. I’m a good person: I distribute every single chip in the bag to somebody buried beneath me. I know I ought to feel humble about my good deed, but I don’t, I turn around because I want to hear all the thank-you’s my ghost should be passing along. Instead, he’s rolling around on the ground, his mouth crammed full of Sunchips, laughing his literal ghost ass off. I mean the kind of laughter you do when you never have to worry about choking to death. “I do a great dad,” my ghost says in the five seconds he can grab between all the laughing. “Don’t I?” Bits of chips are sprinkling out of his face in all directions. “Delta of your life,” he says, doing something obscene with his hands that no statue can stop.  Is that reason number one, for why people hate seeing their own ghosts? The jokes? You tell me. If I could have murdered my ghost, that’s what I would have done. But in a moment, my ghost goes from laughing to rapidly slapping himself, as if little fires were breaking out on random parts of his body. “Quit it,” he shrieks. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he wails. Bits of him start disappearing, a kneecap, an eyeball, his whole left leg. Whatever’s doing this to him seems quite vicious, and very thorough. They leave his mouth so he can scream. When there’s just the head, some spine and one shoulder with a forearm still attached, just as quickly it stops. While my ghost gets the writhing in agony out of his system, I watch the empty bag of Sunchips drift away as if in a breeze, except the air around us is so very still, it’s like the world is holding its breath.  “You had to leave some chips in the Children’s section, didn’t you?” says my ghost, like a kid who never gets to keep anything he wants. “Can you at least get me another cigarette?”  He just sounds sad. Do I ever sound that sad? I give my ghost another cigarette. I even light it for him, seeing as he no longer has any hands. “Are you going to stay fucked up like this?” “So long as I stay here, yeah. But I should get better once I crawl out of this godforsaken SHITHEAP of a place.” “Do you want a ride?” He nods, so I do my best to scoop up what’s left of him into the sack from the store. It’s goopy and disgusting, but you know what? Under my skin, I’m probably just as goopy and disgusting. I don’t hate myself, or my ghost for that matter. But man, I need to make some adjustments if this is what I’m going to be by the time I’m dead.  I’m still ruminating when my ghost starts muttering in its sack, “All right, All RIGHT,” he declaims. “Could this day get any crappier?” I look down into the wreckage of my face as it mouths the words, “Ezra, it’s your dad. He says he used to smoke Camels when he was in his thirties, and was wondering if you could leave what’s left of the pack on top of his headstone.” “Is that all?” I ask. I make the bag with my ghost in it slosh around a bit. “Your parents want you to know they love you and respect your stupid life choices,” mutters my ghost, like he thinks he’s doing me a favor. “Fuck you too,” I jauntily tell my ghost (and maybe my parents?) as we wind our way out of that graveyard. It’s good to be alive. Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Animal Children , published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. His short story "Taylor Swift" won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast , and his fiction can be found most recently in The Glacier, Hex, Anti-Heroin Chic, Heavy Feather Review  and Your Impossible Voice.  He lives in Barcelona. https://linktr.ee/hughsteinberg .

He was a decent dancer and I guess I was too.  We Fevered and YMCA’d until last call so when he inquired, I eagerly scribbled my phone number on a Cover Girl-smudged cocktail napkin.     An ostentatious-orange Corvette drove up to the curb which, to be blunt, was the first mark against him.  Not my favorite color or  set of wheels.  Attired in a loud, polyester dress shirt and cream-colored, wide-wale corduroy pants, his sartorial flare gave me pause.  When he turned to escort me to his vehicle, I was aghast to note a trio of black streaks on the butt of his trousers.     Dinner was a disaster, no surprise.  The guy drank like the proverbial fish and never once did he think to ask about me, about my  life, about my  interests, passions or dreams which was a good thing (for him) because all I wanted for my immediate future was to get as far away from this loser as I could.  My mind scrambled to come up with an exit, an off-ramp, an escape from the insane situation in which I found myself ensnared.  I was clueless as to how I might get untangled from this sorry, pathetic date from the very depths of hell.   Why is it nice girls find it so difficult to assert themselves?  We left the restaurant (did I mention it was an all-you-can-eat buffet?) with plans to head to a new night spot he’d raved about all night.  But first, he wondered aloud, would I care to see his house?  That, too, was something he’d talked about non-stop while we ate.  It was apparent he was quite proud of having become a homeowner at such a young age.   I just didn’t have it in me to decline the earnest enthusiasm of his heartfelt invitation.   He gave me the grand tour which took all of five minutes.  It was a small, older, non-descript home.  Nice enough; neat and clean, nothing fancy.   Good , I thought, time to leave .  Walking through the living room, on our way to the front door, I saw it.  A huge portrait of himself hanging above the sofa, ornate brass candle sconces on either side.  OMG.  Who does  that?  The creep factor with this guy just ratcheted up more than a few notches.   Securely tucked back inside the claustrophobic space of the Corvette’s front seat, I watched as he started the ignition. The guy was nearly giddy in his anticipation of the night’s main event: the two of us tripping ye olde light fantastic.  At this point, I was still along for the ride and this  chick was miserable.  It’s worth pointing out that my date, apparently, possessed not a shred of awareness as to my discomfort.  Girlfriend, what did you get yourself into?   Come on, Julie.   Think .  How to put an end to this nightmare?   Talk soon turned to his job.  He worked on the shop floor of a local manufacturer of recreational vehicles.  Clearly, he enjoyed how he made his living.  Good for him, I generously thought to myself but it wasn’t enough.  Not even close.  He was nice — kinda, sorta — but that was as much grace as I was prepared to yield.   When I mentioned my sister, who also worked there, his excitement was palpable.   That’s your sister?  No way! He then proceeded to regale me with his strong infatuation with my younger sibling.   Dude , I thought, that is NOT the way toimpress a gal .  Even if I had no interest whatsoever in pursuing any kind of relationship with this zero.   Ah, but the best was yet to come.   By this time, I’d zoned out while he droned on and on about his work.   Spermy , he said.     What?  What did he just say?   Yeah, my friends all call me Spermy .   I can’t believe you just told me that , I said, incredulous as I turned away, the blur of Iowa corn fields whizzing past the passenger-side window.    Don’t you want to know why they call me that?   NO , I replied.  It was impossible for me to be emphatic enough on that point.   A brief but awkward silence followed.  I was done playing this game.     I’m not feeling very good.  My sinuses are bothering me.  Please, if you would, drive me home.   At least he was a gentleman as he promptly, and without a word, did just that.     Now, some forty years later, a teeny-tiny part of me wonders, yeah.  I wonder why they did  call him Spermy.  But then again, not really. Julie Allyn Johnson is a sawyer's daughter from the American Midwest whose current obsession is tackling the rough and tumble sport of quilting and the accumulation of fabric.  She enjoys the company, camaraderie and accumulated wisdom of various poets and writers she's met since her publishing journey began in 2018.  A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her work can be found in  Star*Line, Coffin Bell, Haikuniverse, Lowestoft Chronicle, Chestnut Review  and other journals.  Julie enjoys photography and writing the occasional haiku, some of which can be found on her blog, A Sawyer’s Daughter .

Paul had reached, we hoped, the final leg of his dissertation on La-Z-Boy  recliners.  “Babe, help your mother,” Gracie said. She was a good one. Megan, Paul’s mother, looked to be in no particular need of help, but Gracie tried to push Paul always in the right direction. He needed it. Megan couldn’t do it anymore. She’d passed the torch. “Hold on,” Paul said, “I’m mansplaining simultaneous recline and rock.” He said things like that, but I guess we still loved him.  By “we,” I include myself here only grudgingly. And for clarification, I’m Bev, shopping for furniture with the Browns, my oldest friends. There were five of us: the parents (Megan and Gerald), the kids (Paul and Gracie), and Bev. You’re welcome–now, keep up. Megan surely loved her son. That moment, though, she stood transfixed by a natural wood-edge teak coffee table upholstered—festooned?—with the taut hide of a young deer. I’m not an expert on deer, but something about the skin suggested to me a poached doe or fawn. It wasn’t just a skin; a painted hide is more like it, because some droll, wistful man had painted cowboys and Indians chasing across hither and yon.  A young man who worked at the furniture store came to greet us. "Hello, Dr. Brown, Mrs. Brown. Got the kids with you?" The man was younger than Paul, but he called him and Gracie "kids." He had ginger hair and rusty stubble, was tall, athletic, and reached to take Gerald's hand.  Gerald has beautiful tawny hands, large with perfect, strong fingers. I’ve mostly lost the savor of masculine beauty, but you have to admire Gerald’s hands. The furniture salesman was strapping, but his hand looked dainty in Gerald’s. He didn’t reach for Megan’s. One look at her poor hands and you’d understand. She’d had rheumatoid arthritis since before Paul was born. That day at the furniture store—the name’s going to come to me—Megan and I were 73, Gerald was 72, and Paul and Gracie were pushing well up into their thirties.  “Robert,” said Megan, who knew the salesman’s name, of course. “Did you make this?” She didn’t gesture to the table. She might have meant the world itself, for all Robert understood. I’ll never understand if Megan enjoyed confusing people, keeping people on their toes, or if she simply took no part in our understanding. “Ma’am?” Robert asked, squinting, a little sweat beading on his pink forehead—it was hot in the front gallery; the glass entrance door had a handwritten sign warning of problems with the heat. This was January, but the day was pleasant; inside, the store was sweltering. "The table," I said and did gesture. I didn't like it when people were confused by her. Mind you, this was something that spanned back most of our lives. It was getting worse. “Ah, nope,” he said. “Sure is something, though.” “I think,” Megan said, “it’s a little rustic for our living room. But we do need a coffee table. It really is something.” She smiled in a way that put Robert at ease. She was good that way. You couldn’t find a kinder person. I didn’t know if she honestly admired the awful table. It was always her mystery that made you feel, no matter how well or poorly things were going in your own life, that you maybe only circled hers.  “I kind of like it,” Paul said. He gave Gracie a child’s pleading look, like, can we? She evaded with a funny kind of pirouette and went on into the larger showroom to the right of the entrance gallery. Shrewd.  But before he could follow, Megan took Paul’s arm and they admired the poor dead baby deer table for a while. I thought they both had something to tell the other, but I only knew for certain Megan’s hard news. And I wanted, awfully, to go away and let that moment last as long as it could. Paul rested his head on the top of hers. He kissed her crown, right there in front of God and everyone. He did it all the time. Gerald, as ever, looked so confused—felt, I think, that he too risked interrupting something but had nowhere else to be. He was sweating, too, and stooped, rummaging a collection of cavalry swords and walking canes in a tall iron fireplace basket. The front room had a gentleman's motif, a few distressed leather pieces, a billiard set, a mahogany bar, and, lining a hallway back toward an office, some full-sized safes.  Nothing for me there, I followed Gracie into a larger showroom of mostly sofas and recliners. That’s where I fell briefly in love with a purple chair.   I hope this isn’t confusing. I’m not a storyteller. Let’s try to set things right. Others might try to steal the spotlight, but I mean this as a testament to Megan. We were there at F. F. McFadden's Fine Furniture—sure, why not?—to buy a living room set for Gracie and Paul. They'd bought a house and had the kitchen and the upstairs covered. For their downstairs office, Megan had given them her oak bookcases. She'd given away all her hundreds of volumes of mysteries and switched over to a Kindle, paperback print too small for old eyes, anymore.  She had the most beautiful pale electric blue eyes. It’s the first thing anyone remembers. A rascally smile—Paul has it, too. I want to call her beautiful, but the arthritis had aged her early and by then, the best word I have is “small.”  This all happened before she died, obviously, and before Paul lost his mind, Gracie almost lost her baby, Gerald wilted like a rose, mostly gone in sad sweet petals, or crumbled like the flakes of chewing tobacco he left like breadcrumbs through his life.  This isn’t a story about Gerald, either. He’s an imposing, silent man. There may never be a story about Gerald.  But before you know any more about any of that, you have to understand I could not decide if this fuchsia button-tufted wingback chair clashed with the terracotta drapes and the turmeric throw in my nearly perfect living room.  It was not a perfect living room the way that sounds. I’m a poor retired teacher. I just almost had it the way I wanted. And now this chair came into my life and upended all of that.  As I stood enraptured by it, tracing tawdry fingerings along the supple stitchwork, Gracie and Paul played around the sectionals, giggling, goosing and grab-assing, because they thought no one was looking.  Let that be a lesson to you—Beverly is always looking. Paul went for any couch wild or garish, distressed leather U-shapes and lime loveseats, a black leather Chesterfield with a Union Jack emblazoned all the way across. Surely he was joking with that. Patient, abiding Gracie reigned him back to the choice between a taupe modern L-shape and an ash transitional L—these faced off across the showroom’s central, widest row. Paul considered, then pointed to the latter, because it was bigger. We’d visited the new house early that morning and there was certainly space to fill. Gracie looked at the tag and balked. “Nineteen hundred? We can’t.” I noticed Gracie kept patting absently at her stomach. Paul sat on various sections of the ash sofa, wiggling his butt. “Ah. We can.”  “We owe them so much already.” “It’s cool.” Paul tried to be casual, but the two grand played a little in his eyes. “We’ll pay them with our tax returns. And I did all that yard work last month.” “You picked up sticks in their front yard and put them in their backyard.” “I also pulled the vines off the trees out front.” “No, you pulled the vines off of two trees, and then you said it was ‘too hurty.’” “To be fair, it was hurty.” Paul grimaced, wriggling his fingers in phantom pain. “I know. I did the other five.” Gracie mimicked his wriggling, gave him the bird. “So, they owe us both.”  “Not two thousand dollars.” “I don’t know what you charge for your time, babe, but that’s about right for mine.” The lights thrummed down for a moment and some commotion arose from deeper in the store, from a hallway leading off on the left side of the showroom. I went to investigate because I'm nosey, and because I didn't want to listen to the kids bicker anymore. Except, it wasn’t bickering; that was how they spoke to each other all the time—Gracie serious, Paul aloof, and they stood very close and petted each other and you got the sense that if they were too long out of each other’s company, they’d perish like fruit. Megan told me she knew they’d get married the first time she met Gracie, because it was plainly there. Love. Young love bores me. So—the commotion. It was much hotter in the hallway leading off the showroom, and down it on the left was a sort of alcove or cubicle. “This dang heat!” shouted a young woman stuck behind a counter there in the tiled alcove squeezed in by wood paneling and guardian, one assumes, of the cashbox. She shouted, “Frank! I’m dying!” “I know, Marla!” came the voice of some Frank from a door that led outside at the end of her alcove.  “Howdy,” Marla said to me. “How can we help today?” "I'm interested in a fuchsia easy chair." “I think we have a pink chair in the west gallery.” She pointed from where I’d come. “You do. I found it.”  “Oh. Do you have the item number?” I wanted to ask what it was she did there. “No. Do you offer any kind of layaway?” “Well, we can talk to Frank. He’s the owner.” She hooked a thumb back toward the door. I need to back up and add that the whole compound—the only real word for it—spanned 40,000 square feet, easy, with the front gallery, at least two large showrooms including where I’d left Gracie and Paul and a second beyond, and a vast warehouse adjoining at the rear of the property. We’d arrived at noon to an empty parking lot, the Saturday shopping traffic likely gone to lunch or scared off by the signage. A big razor-wire fence with a mechanized gate was set to close off what must have been north of 2 million in inventory, with the furniture—all high end—and the safes and outdoor patio sets and saunas, marble statuary and such stored in as-yet unexplored rooms and wings.  A middle-aged, redheaded man, paunchy and clearly salesman Robert’s father, came inside the alcove shaking his head. “Wilkes thinks he’s got it.” “Wilkes ain’t got sh—” Marla remembered me and smiled. “He hasn’t got anything. Call the HVAC people. Why can’t we just turn it off?” Frank ignored Marla, looked me over once, and appraised me as a hopeless miser-woman. He had the gift. "Howdy," he said, shambling past me down the hallway. From outside came a big clatter and curses. “I’m calling the HVAC guys,” Marla said to me or no one. I went back down the hallway past the showroom to the front gallery, and as I passed a large open safe in an obsidian finish and bigger than a fridge, a hand reached out and grabbed my shirt sleeve. “Damn!” I shouted. I’d almost peed my slacks. Megan held my arm. She stood entirely in the safe. Her face was twisted up. Finally, she smiled weakly and let me go. “Close it.” I squinted at her. “Just for a minute.” I didn’t have to ask. I did what I was told. I was afraid I wouldn’t hear her knock, but in six or seven seconds, she did, and I opened it again with a tug. She came out and took my arm and led me to see a cherry coffee table that looked identical to what she had at home. “It’s taller,” she explained, “and I’m getting shorter.” Who the hell knows what that meant? In the main showroom, Megan and I found Gracie fretting still over the price tag on the sectional. Paul watched her, then secreted something between the couch cushions and said in a loud voice, “Drills!” Gracie hopped to attention. “It’s time for Jeopardy and where’s the remote? Move! It’s 5:02!” They rushed around, Paul looking under pillows, Gracie patting along the couch, digging between cushions and furrowing her brow. She found it quickly—Paul's phone—and they sat together simultaneously as synchronized swimmers, tossed legs over knees in mirror-reverse, Gracie flipping imaginary channels. “Not bad,” Paul said. “Workable.”  “My children are silly people,” said Megan, announcing her presence.  Paul winked at her. “Drills! Mom and Bev are over and everyone has chili. No spills!” We pantomimed with our bowls and all fit easily enough. “I like it better without so many beans,” I offered.  Paul looked long into his bowl. He gave a forlorn stir and sighed. “The magical fruit.” Paul and Gracie went to look in another showroom where Megan believed more couches lined the upper floor.  I led her on a shambling path toward the fuchsia wingback nearby in a corner of other misfit items, hoping she might notice it on her own. “Have you told him yet?” I had to ask. She shook her head, mouth drawn into a tight line. “Later. Let’s buy their couch.” “Paul wants an easy chair, too.” I ratted him out.  “I know, Bev.”  I can be a tattletale. Megan never liked that. She loved her secrets. "Hot damn, that's a chair." Gerald had found us. He went and sat in my fuchsia wingback and beamed at us. I'll always love that man. Somewhere in the next showroom, Gracie squealed. “Stop it, Paul.” Too much life, too much death. It can make you giddy. Not me, though. Giddy’s not in my repertoire. I leaned into Megan’s ear. “You need to tell them, honey.” “You worry too much.” Megan gave me a long look. “It gives you cancer.” She passed around me and went to Gerald. “Here,” she said, handing him her purse. “That’s better.” He took it proudly, crossing his legs at the knee.  “I’m thinking of buying it.” I had to say it. It felt good to get it out there. Megan frowned. “I’m trying to picture it in your house. The foyer? Upstairs?” Then, she had it: “Oh, out in your workshop. Sure!” I shook my head. “Not the living room?” She couldn’t see it there either, not with my father’s best pieces and the earth tones and the lowlight and the ferns. In terms of decor, my house is mostly a museum of my father, the carpenter, who died of lung cancer five years prior. He never smoked a cigarette in his life. Megan smoked two packs a day until after Paul graduated college. She was going tomorrow to get a mobile oxygen unit.  She’d be dead in three more months. We drifted. In a soft-lit annex of bedroom suites with beds and lamps and dressers, Megan plucked a leather-bound volume from a writing desk and flipped pages. "I never read Sherlock Holmes," she said.  “Well, you’ve read more than about anybody else has, for what it’s worth.” I didn’t like the eulogizing, but it wasn’t my funeral, so to speak. It was true, though—Megan must have read at least a book a day. I always assumed she preferred mysteries because things resolved so neatly. Who knows her reason, though? I never asked.  It’s not a bad thought though—it’s worth considering. I like resolutions. It gives me an idea—but hold that thought. “I don’t remember anything I read,” she said. “I’ve been re-reading the same three books all year long. It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s a series about an earthquake in Siam. I think I’m stuck forever.”  “I think I read The Hound of the Baskervilles .” “I wish I’d been a detective.” “I can’t see that at all.” I was always honest with her; she always called me mean. It was a joke we had, though it hurt my feelings. “You’re very cryptic, but you’re indecisive.” Normally, a person perks at hearing herself described, but she shook her head once, a new mannerism she’d have until the end, like saying, “There’s no time for that.” “Listen, Beverly. I need to tell you something.” I thought she was going to ask me to check in on Gerald and Paul, to extend some aspect of her presence, as if I could, but she knew I couldn’t, and she told me, “Please don’t be unhappy.” And I couldn’t look at her, but I nodded. “Don’t you be unhappy. Buy your purple chair. Make urns and vases like in those poems you used to make me read. The Ancient Greek stuff.” I’d never made her read a poem in my life, Greek or otherwise. We went back to Gerald dozing in my chair. The kids came back, no luck in the other showrooms. Gracie seemed resigned. “It’s hot in here, folks. Time for lunch?” "Hey Mommy, buy us that couch," Paul said, pointing to the ash sectional again. Gracie hit his arm, feigned mortification. Her blush seemed real, but her eyes gave away the plan. “How much?” The kids jumped; they hadn’t noticed Gerald in my chair. "Damn, Dad. That chair is really you." He smirked. “How much is the couch?” “Doesn’t matter,” Gracie said. Suddenly Frank, the proprietor, barreled into the showroom and down our aisle—-probably he had the place bugged. At any rate, he surmised the situation by triangulating our proximity to the sectional. “We could probably do seventeen on that,” he said. “Howdy, Doc. That chair brings out your eyes.” Some device on his belt beeped. “Frank? You there?” He begged a moment with his finger and snapped up the device. "Yeah, Wilkes." “This thing is fucked.” “I’m with customers.” “Yeah, I see.” A man in coveralls with one of those mullet hairdos and mutton chops came striding into the showroom with a Walkie Talkie, walking with his knees bowed like he’d been out busting broncos. As he passed Gracie’s couch, he brushed a grease stain across a cushion. Gracie squeaked. “Careful,” Frank said. He smiled at Gracie. “A little Dawn and that’ll come right out. Just give me a moment.” Wilkes chuckled at Gerald in my chair. “Hey, folks. Frank, the HVAC’s fixing to blow, gonna take the whole grid down with it, I bet. I did everything I could.” “You broke my good socket wrench, is what you did.” They sidled off, arguing in low voices. We watched them go, except for Gracie, who stared at the grease smudge on the cushion. “It is hot in here,” Gerald said. He rose gingerly from my chair, his knees cracking loudly. Paul helped him up. “Well, let’s buy a couch and go.”  “What about your La-Z-Boy?” Megan crossed her arms as if she had him, but knew as well as anyone, no one out-schemed Paul.  "Actually, I have it covered." He scooped into his jeans pocket and flashed a roll of bills. "We just need a little help with the couch." “What the hell, Paul?” Gracie asked. “Did you rob a bank?”  “I sold my Magic cards.” “How much for?” “Two grand.” Gerald reached into Paul's pocket and took the money. He put it in his own.  Gracie shook her head. “We only need the couch, doofus.” “Why not both?” Paul turned a beaming smile on his parents. “We’ll pay you back.”  Megan hemmed. “What about this one?” She pointed to a perfectly boring taupe sofa, just a three-seater with an orange sale sticker on the tag. Was she solving a problem or getting a rise?  Gracie nobly faked consideration. "It goes with the shiplap." Paul grinned. He had everyone precisely where he wanted.  "Nowhere to put the baby, not with guests." Gracie blushed again. I checked a strong impulse to yell, “I knew it!” I’d gloat later. “Well!” Megan shuffled over—she moved so slowly—and gave them both a kiss between the eyes. She stared past their shoulders into the showroom for a while. We watched her, those who knew and those who didn’t on either side of a thin divide too endless deep and mean for me to worry over anymore. Just goddamn aging, time creeping up the ass of everything.  She said, “I just can’t believe it.” Then she perked up, came back into the room with us. “Which embryo?” I know she knew, but wanted to hear it. “The girl,” Paul said. It was Gerald who gave away the game, bursting into tears and sitting heavily on a chartreuse loveseat. Megan made it to him first, somehow, and leaned as best she could and told him, “Stop it, please, honey. Now’s not the time.” Gracie began crying, too. She held her flat belly. “Did I do something wrong?” Paul kept saying, “Dad? Dad?” And then came a thundering bang, and down went the lights. In the darkness, someone shrieked.  No more than a minute later, the fluorescents flickered back to life, casting first an eerie, sepia pall, then bringing the room back up to technicolor. British technicolor, mind you. Please adjust your ear to accents. The costumes have changed, too.  “Sorry about that!” Mister Franklin McFadden, the shoppe’s prim proprietor, called out from the doorway between the showrooms. “Wilkes? What’s happened?” Mr. Franklin looked around, confused.  “Oh my god!” Ms. Gracie jumped onto a couch. She pointed a thin, ivory finger down at the floor a few meters away where a form lay crumpled on the Pergo. It was Wilkes, prone, motionless, a cavalry sword protruding from between his shoulder blades and a dark stain swelling underneath him. “Gads!” I shouted.  “Everyone, please be calm,” came the cool voice of the Inspector. “I’m afraid there’s been a murder.” Angela Lansbury herself would have swooned at Megan’s single-breasted henna blazer, her understated pearls, her box pleated skirt and crisp stockings. But it was her hand-blocked wool fedora with its jaunty upward lilting brim that put wrongdoers most on edge.  “Dearie!”  Mr. Franklin came shuffling over, fretting nervously at his watch chain and peering queasily at his dead assistant. “I cannot abide blood,” he added, turning away. “Father?” The young Mister Robert McFadden came into the showroom. “What’s all this?” “Gads,” I said again, for I felt as if no one had heard me the first time. “Everyone, please remain calm,” said the Inspector. “I’ll have to ask you to be seated.” The Misters Franklin and Robert seemed at last to notice her. “Goodness,” Franklin exclaimed. “What luck! It’s the Inspector down from Shillingham.” "What brings you to our village?" asked the son, who could not quite match his father's gracious affect. Already, beads of sweat formed along the rosy edges of his brow.  “I’ve brought my son Paul and his wife here in search of a new living room,” Inspector Megan said flatly, staring at Wilkes where he lay seeping. “I’ve given up waiting for a free afternoon. And work follows me everywhere.” Franklin nodded. “I see you’ve got your assistant, too, and the good Doctor. A family affair! What luck.” “Is it lucky, though? You’re down an odd-jobman.” “No, of course.”  Young Robert had slipped away but returned now with a blanket with which he clearly meant to cover the cadaver. Inspector Megan put a halt to this with a stern look and insisted again that everyone be seated. She hated for anyone to interfere with the victim before she and the Doctor could give a full inspection. “There’s someone on the telephone,” announced Ms. Marla, the fiancée of Mr. Robert, from the hallway that led away to the shoppe’s office. “Oh, what’s all this, then?” “Better have a seat,” I told her. That was part of my job as the inspector’s assistant. Directing traffic, making tea. I glanced at The Inspector. “Shall I put on a kettle?” "Afraid the stove's out," Marla said. Then her eyes settled on Wilkes, and without so much as a peep, she fled the showroom. We heard her padding down the hallway.  “Where’s that hallway lead?” the Inspector asked.  “The warehouse,” Franklin and Robert said in unison. “Where else?” “Just the employee lounge.” “Let’s go,” Megan said to me. This was my cue, as I could far exceed her pace. Off I went down the hallway after Ms. Marla. Luckily, she hadn’t thought to lock the heavy doors into the warehouse, but inside, I became immediately lost in the sprawl of plastic-wrapped furniture and crates and boxes stacked high up, nearly to the tin ceiling. “Marla!” I shouted. No answer. Then I noticed footprints—heel prints—in the dust and packing foam.  I found her in the lounge, kneeling before a locker bestrewn with broadsides of ill-clad women, much confederate iconography, and a pair of dirty dungarees and a shirt hanging from hooks. Marla knelt low, scooping from the bottom of the locker a packet of twine-bound letters. “Drat,” she said, noticing me behind her. “Please, just let me take these, before Robert…” But it was too late. The proprietors had followed and young Robert demanded this correspondence with a pitiful sigh. "You swore it was over," he added in a querulous voice, clearly never having been assuaged of his suspicions. "Ah, Marla," he said and deflated there before us in a most loud and unmanly fashion. Now it 'twas I who needed to turn away. We left them to their lovers’ quarrel. Franklin and I returned to the showroom where I reported the goings-on to the Inspector, as ever inscrutable in her reaction, her blue eyes sparkling, her brow furrowing, the poor knotted hands working idly at the stitchwork on her jacket.  “Interesting,” she said. “But that woman is no killer.” “What about the boy, Robert?” the Doctor asked. He liked to guess, though he never came near the scent. Inspector Megan shook her head once. “No. Too vain. He’d never admit it to himself, not without the proof. It’s all out of order.” I raised my hand. “I think it was Master Paul.” “Poppycock,” said Paul. “And I’m a Mister, thank you.” "You always think it's Paul," said the Inspector. "He can be three hundred kilometers away, aboard a ship and flat out with a fever, and it's 'Paul, Paul, Paul.'"  “Poppycock,” Paul said again. He laughed at the word and repeated it until Ms. Gracie elbowed his ribs. “I hate to interrupt,” said Mr. Franklin, “but there is the matter of the grease stain.” He stared cooly at Gracie, who seemed to wilt, ducking behind Paul. “Doctor,” the Inspector said, “does anything strike you as off with the body?” “As a matter of fact,” Doctor Gerald said, bending gingerly to poor Wilkes there trying in vain to cool despite the infernal heat of the showroom, “it does.”  “The blood?” the Inspector asked. "Indeed, my dearest. This is mere seepage. A sword wound of this magnitude should have expelled all kinds of arterial spray all over this fine upholstery." He gave a general flourish to the couches nearby, then pantomimed blood spraying from his own back and made a sputtering sound with his tongue and lips. No wonder Paul had never learned his mother's sense of propriety.  “Precisely,” Inspector Megan said. “The blood’s wrong.” “If you knew it,” the Doctor retorted, “why have me kneel? Someone, help me up.” Paul leapt to.  “So,” Mr. Franklin said, doffing his cap, the wheels behind his eyes rolling slowly over. “If the sword wasn’t the true implement, then?” “Paul,” said the Inspector, “please lift the second cushion on that ash sectional.” Underneath was a bent and bloody socket wrench. We all gasped. “Gads,” I said. "My wrench!" Mr. Franklin shouted. He scanned us wildly. "Treachery! I've been set up! I'm no killer, but 'twas in the other showroom, concealing flatulence!" Inspector Megan wrinkled her nose. “It’s true, I’m afraid.”  “So, it was  Paul,” I offered.  Everyone looked at me.  “What? You’re not telling me it was Gracie?” Megan put her arm gently on my elbow. "Dearest, it's time to give up the charade. You nearly fooled me. I thought it was Gerald after that look Wilkes gave him in the purple chair. And that certainly is his sword work. That I'd know a mile away." Gerald shrugged. “I panic easily in the dark.” “But, Beverly, I also saw the way you rankled at Wilkes’ reaction to your chair. You missed the macho undertones completely, so worried about your precious sense of fashion.” “I think it’s pretty,” said Gracie, a good girl, much too good for Paul. I backed away, but Paul and Gerald cut off my exits. How did I ever hope to foil the greatest mind in the commonwealth? With some relief, I exclaimed, “Ooh, you bitch. You’re good.” I sat in my wingback and offered up my wrists for the hobbles. Thankfully, someone had left them in the car.  While we waited for the constabulary, the entire Brown clan teased Gracie about names for the baby.  “I still think it was Paul,” I said, but no one listened. OK, Megan, I tried. Surely, in Heaven of all places, you can find it to forgive whatever the hell that was.  But, honestly, you’re not here, and I like my story better. By the time the actual power returned, Gerald had regained composure and was able to pass off his outburst as a reaction to Gracie’s good news and the heat. Paul and Gracie didn’t seem to believe him, but as he brought out the Mastercard and led the kids to Marla in the office, followed by Frank, practically skipping, they let it go. They arranged delivery for next week on both the ash sectional and a La-Z-Boy for Paul, and before we loaded up to head for lunch, I saw Gerald return Paul’s wad of cash in a furtive handoff.  They gave him everything, but that’s their business. In fairness, he appreciated them. I imagine that’s all there needs to be. They made a wall with it, one the rest of us couldn’t enter. You liked to be near it, though. Gracie and I might have shared a few looks as Paul got everything he wanted, but it made you happy, knowing someone did. Then again, I guess he didn’t.  Do I need to tell you that in the parking lot after lunch at the Gondola pizzeria, Paul and Megan shared a cigarette and she must have told him then about her diagnosis because he took her cigarette and stomped it out and was loud and then quiet and then they held each other for a long time there between my truck and her Toyota and the rest of us decided we'd take a walk down to the liquor store a block away? There. What does it change? I could add that because this was Paul, and because this was Megan, some barely teenage boys saw them hugging and carrying on in the parking lot and one must have said something, because Paul shouted at them, not even words, just a roar, and the boys ran to their car, and Megan held his face in her sore hands and told him something and that’s when Gerald suggested we should go and get more wine, as if there might be enough in the world. Megan did not approve of drinking, and Gracie couldn’t. As for the rest of us, we drank all evening. Paul made a lovely dinner. He’s an excellent cook. I’m hard on him because I’m jealous. Late, after Megan had gone to bed, I found Paul and Gerald passing a joint on the back steps. They were telling stories about Megan as if she’d passed already, having no idea of everything that was coming, but they were laughing and standing close together. I didn’t want to intrude, but they insisted I join them, and it seemed like they wanted me to tell a story, too. Stars above their woods made a pale gauze of the clouds. It was cold and the smoke of their breath and the joint piled above them.  I had to think a while for one they wouldn’t know. “When we were sixteen, your mother played the flute, and she loved a boy named Harold. He was the first chair and she was second chair and she’d learned all these songs he liked—he listened to jazz, like Bennie Goodman. Megan hated jazz. But she would play the songs when they were warming up and it annoyed him. I think Harold was gay, but that’s beside the point. He didn’t love her back, for whatever reason.” “I was in band, too, and I teased her about it. She wouldn’t admit to anything. She claimed not to care at all about Harold and to love Bennie Goodman. So, I guess it was the fall or the very end of summer and they were going to decide the chairs again and we know they’re going to evaluate us that afternoon and Megan just won’t stop playing Bennie Goodman, it was “Sing, Sing, Sing,” I think. She’s working it into the marches. It’s throwing Harold. She’s getting looks, the tall blonde girl with the flute bopping along, out of sync with everyone—and she was a good player, normally.” They watched me, expectant, shivering, but I couldn’t finish the story. My voice had simply gone away. I’m not an emotional person and I was embarrassed. They went inside and soon enough, we all went to bed.    Early next morning, I was pulling on my shoes on the couch. Gerald and Megan were still asleep—they always sleep in on weekends. Paul burst in through the kitchen door and smiled and waved me over. He put his finger to his mouth, knowing his parents would be asleep. But at the kitchen door, he stopped me and took a deep breath and told me like he'd worked up a speech: "You've always done so much for my mom. I saw how much you wanted your chair, so I…" And he just gestured out to my truck, where he'd already moved the fuchsia wingback from his own.  "I returned the La-Z-Boy. I didn't want it." His smile went watery, but he wanted very much for this to be a happy thing. I put my hand on his shoulder, though I’m not much of a touch-er. And I told him, “Paul, you cannot do this. It’s too much.” “No.” He shook his head. He had to wipe away tears. “I just think…I know. Everybody should have whatever they want.”  And that was his speech. He went to wake up his parents or to go sleep in the spare room, I don't know. I got in my truck and left, wishing I'd told him something better than just "thank you." When I got home, I took the chair to a friend. She loves it. I never finished the story. Why did Megan play Bennie Goodman all through that rehearsal? She lost second chair and had to win it back. It took all fall. I never heard her play that song again. She lost interest in Harold, too.   When I asked her, she only smiled. She told me, “That’s why we’re friends, Bev. You ask all the right questions.” Maybe Harold was like the purple chair. How do you know what the thing you really want is? How do you?  I’m really asking.  I’d really like to know. Lucas Flatt's work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House and other fine publications. He teaches at Volunteer State Community College. You can find him on X at @lucasflatt1.

Her Soviet Her Soviet looked, with the disdain of flowers, askance at all and sundry. A Collective,superior beauty but in constant need of a carer. Peripatetic petals all. Her Soviet composed of packets of meat offcuts imprudently piled. Bodies formed from the memory foam of misguided marital beds. They only consumed food that contained the potential to be formed in to a mound. She- topped with watermelon and bottomed unironically in the hue of the recently departed. Her Soviet lived by the Ho Ho Credo* For Her Soviet she made felt effigies, that they all kept in drawers, and not one of them could muster the required fervored hatred despite being allowed, being encouraged and hate being simpler than thinking. Peripatetic petals all. All living a life up on blocks. *it wasn’t Christmas until they had all seen the Wanking Santa in Pontypridd *** A wartime lecture* on nutrition delivered by Noel Coward from his suite at the Savoy Hotel wearing merely a smoking jacket and lipstick We had a few sherries on a pretty bad Blitz but not as bad as Wednesday. Couple of bombs and the walls bowed a bit. Carroll Gibbons played the piano, I sang as did Judy and a pair of drunken Scots Canadians joined in. They played ‘Danny Boy’ on humbled bagpipes. I played the part of their indulged indulgent cartoon. More bombs on Friday, more dancing. *the nutritional value of recreational piss is inestimably cloudy *** Kindness is logged The Wifi Password is ‘Love Everybody #1’. I drink from all cups and then none and I spectate as the dehoused individual is disgorged. A hot drink for a winter smile always struck me as a fair trade. The Wifi Password is ‘Love Everybody #1’ and all kindness is logged and all love rests into a milky dislike. *** Girls who laugh at death Finger entry girls,calluses on veiny hands, tap out looney tunes on chapel oak with nails as long as birds claws. Late to the font again. Valleys moga fuelled by fugazi fudge bombs and the feminine urge to crowdfund a coven. Russet cheeked alpha,buffet butt omega. Girls who laugh at death and pushover headstones. *** Work Party Every other day or so, a delicious new flavour of cope another way to lay,stitch eye shut coffined,attached to the floor,peering at the ceiling figures sheepishly rooting. One room after one room after a string of precedented times forming an orderlike can queue as the vacant lot of her belly bloated, all the while not feeling pretty pretty enough for play. A spirit raped and polished. That was Monday, finished. *** KG is a poet and author based in Wales. The author of the best-selling 'Troubadour Tales' series of books on Bob Dylan, he has now embarked on a poetic journey. Published in Wales, Ireland, England and now in the US his first book , 'Poetry For The Feeble Minded' was published to critical acclaim. His current WIP, 'A Working Class Book Of Psalms' from which these poems are taken, is due to be published in 2026.

The machine came in a box without instructions. No label. Just a black mark where the sender’s name should have been. It looked like a cross between a cassette deck and a bread maker. I had to drag it upstairs on a towel. The first time I plugged it in, nothing happened. No hum. No light. Just the bite of ozone, like air after lightning. It didn’t have a screen. Just a narrow slot and a tiny embossed label beneath it reading: handwritten only . I tried a grocery list. A recipe. A line from a poem I often misquoted. Nothing. It didn’t respond until I wrote a name. Just the name. No explanation. Then it spoke. It didn’t speak out loud. The words appeared on a small strip of paper, like a receipt printing itself in reverse. The font was old, serifed, a little uneven. The first message said: Do you want to hear it or say it back? I didn’t know what that meant, so I tried another name. Someone I hadn’t thought about in a long time. This time, the strip read: She said: It’s not your fault. But she wanted you to try harder. I stared at it for a long time. Folded it twice. Put it in my pocket. The machine took anything I gave it. Half-names. Nicknames. Ones I wasn’t sure how to spell. Its answers got quicker, more intimate. Some responses were brief. He didn’t believe you, but he wanted to. She left before the argument got bad. She only remembers your laugh. No . But he would’ve said yes if you’d asked again. Others were longer. Whole paragraphs, sometimes. Memories I never knew they had. Or maybe ones I’d invented and given to them. It never answered questions. Just spoke as if it already knew what I was asking. I started saving paper scraps. Anything I could write a name on. Receipts, old envelopes, the backs of takeout menus. There was a pen in every room. I told myself I wasn’t using it that often. Just when I couldn’t sleep. When something came back too sharply. When I wanted to know how it might have gone differently. I stopped telling friends when I let someone off the hook. I let the machine say it for me. It never gave me what I asked for. But the words were close enough to stand behind. That was enough. One night I fed it my own name. The paper took longer to print. I thought it had jammed, but then the strip appeared. You already know. I didn’t try that again. Then one night it printed a name I hadn’t entered. I was brushing my teeth. The machine wasn’t even turned on. Or I hadn’t meant for it to be. But there it was, a single strip of paper waiting beside the slot. You owe her more than you admit. I read it twice before throwing it away. Maybe I’d written the name in my sleep. But it kept happening. New names. Some I hadn’t thought about in years. Others I didn’t recognize. Messages waiting in the morning or when I got home. She forgave you. You just weren’t there to hear it. He told someone else first. You were too late. I started sleeping with the machine unplugged, but the messages kept coming. There were other changes, too. Names I’d never written down. Sentences that didn’t feel like apologies, but warnings. Don’t check the date on this one. You ’re not who you think you are. Close the drawer. Close the drawer. Close the drawer. I opened the nightstand anyway. Inside were the folded slips. All the messages I told myself I kept because maybe I’d need them. I found one I didn’t remember reading. Didn’t remember saving. It said: You’re not done yet. That was the last message for a while. I stopped feeding names. Stopped checking the tray. A month passed. I thought it was over. Then one morning, the machine was humming again. There was no paper in the tray. Just the name already printed, faint and curling out of the slot. It was a name I’d never spoken out loud. Not to anyone. Not even myself. My hand shook as I tore the strip free. It said: He would have stayed if you’d asked. He was waiting for you to say something true. It  wouldn’t have fixed everything. But it would have changed everything. I didn’t fold that one. Didn’t pocket it or throw it away. I slid it back into the machine and closed the lid. I put it in the hall closet and shut the door. I haven’t opened it since. I still keep a pen in every room. I don’t write names anymore. That doesn’t mean it stopped collecting them. Ryan T. Pozzi is a writer and cultural critic who explores legacy, myth, and reputation, with particular attention to who shapes our understanding of history. His writing has been accepted by Rattle, Fjords Review, Northern New England Review, and Ponder Review, among others. He is a 2025 Best of the Net nominee. Find him at ryantpozzi.com  or on social media @ryantpozzi.

The girl who swallowed coins Let’s say the first five pence went down between handfuls of popcorn. As Elizabeth’s teeth hit metal, it was a do or don’t, spit or swallow moment. Let’s say she calculated the risks of this coin getting lodged or causing mischief at the other end and found them within tolerance limits. She swallowed, thinking of Carmen, the precise lines of her bob, the moon pebble perfection of her teeth when she laughed.  The next evening, she gulped down another five-pence piece. Let’s say she began to see these coins as protection, as a way to steel herself through all those do or die moments at school, like whether to eat lunch with the artsy crowd (tolerated, not much to contribute) or the outliers (lots to say, not much listening) and how to stop when she could see people’s eyes glazing over but hadn’t finished her story. In short, how to navigate the mysterious world of other people. She found the metallic lick of the coin, the brief pressure at the back of her throat, reassuring. Let’s say the coin girl correlated the greater percentage of copper, nickel and steel in her insides to a greater strength of character. She made friends who didn’t mind her iffy eye contact. When Carmen started dating a football player, Elizabeth honed her attention on a gutsy girl who hung around the edges like she did. Marina had sea green eyes and the lean energy of a whippet. She liked how much Elizabeth knew about dogs, her encyclopedic knowledge of different breeds.   Let’s say Elizabeth’s mother discovered the coin swallowing and booked her in with a therapist to rid her of this “dirty little habit.” While speeding through twenty-mile-an-hour zones and zipping through amber lights, her mother monologued a series of “If you think… I keep telling you… You have no idea…” while breezily cheerful Magic FM DJs chimed in: “Tell us what you like for breakfast. Cold pizza? Hula hoops? We don’t judge!”  Let’s say in the soothing greens and plastic plants of the therapist’s office, Elizabeth found a person who asked questions and listened. After multiple conversations were stalled by her mother’s “I keep telling her… She seems to think…” the therapist asked her to leave. In the quiet that followed, Elizabeth decided that swallowing her mother’s judgement exceeded tolerance limits. And so she learned to say when she was overloaded, to say “I’d rather you didn’t” and “What I think is.” She called out social rules she found meaningless. She learned illogic wasn’t always a stumbling block for other people.  And so a family truce was eventually negotiated.   And so she discovered that coins and character were not cause and effect, that she was already made of copper and iron and strength and forged her path without them. Cole Beauchamp (she/her) is a queer writer based in London. Her stories have been in the Wigleaf Top 50, nominated for awards and shortlisted for the Bath, Bridport, Oxford and WestWord prizes for flash fiction. She's been widely published in lit mags including Mr Bull, Ghost Parachute, The Hooghly Review, Gooseberry Pie and others, and is a contributing editor at New Flash Fiction Review. She lives with her girlfriend and has two children. You can find her on bluesky at @ nomad-sw18.bsky.social

Another exhausted day yawns, a winter chill painting my knuckles white as I sink into my pillow and replay January. A plane ride ago, the herd of us spilled out of Worthing Square, bellies half-full with cold beef patties and pockets empty as we flooded the sidewalk to go who-knows-where—the boardwalk, Quayside, any corner we could claim. The streets were ours and they were just driving in it, the gaze of grizzled men on my bare waist, their Mazdas throbbing with bass and spilling soap-bitter smoke as I looped arms with the girls because they couldn’t take us all if they tried. We poured into a moonlit beach no one will ever call Private, traced our sand-filled sandals into Chillymoos. In chipped plastic chairs, coconut ice cream melting down our fingers, we threw our heads back with laughter and fuck-you ’s that meant Never change . A table from us a guy in a cliché Hawaiian shirt scorned, I thought this was a tourist spot , but the ground was ours and he was just playing on it. Choiselle Joseph is a writer from Barbados. Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rust & Moth, Gone Lawn,  and elsewhere. Her writing centres gender, the body, and decolonisation and their current project is Hummingbird , an in-progress chapbook exploring daughterhood through myth and surreal imagery. They are an editor at The Saartjie Journal.

A child steps into an orange grove.  Not realizing it, he continues to strut along.  I am sorry that I can’t explain to you my dear why the earth does its magical things.  But at that very moment, an orange broke from the tree and made home for the boy’s head.  This snapped him back to earth’s beautiful reality.  Coming to sense where he was, the boy began to smell the delicious fragrances, and the beautiful state of all of the oranges.  Not one was rotten or miscolored.  All had the same fresh painted skin, golden in the sun.  The boy, still admiring their beauty, plucked one effortlessly.  He held the orange with cupped hands. It seemed to humble him, the sight of a single but mighty aspect of the moment. Celia Johnson is 11 years old, and a native of Minnesota.